The Blues looked sluggish in the first 45 minutes against a resilient Hull but managed to breakdown the hard working defense and take advantage of Manchester City playing on Sunday and Arsenal on Monday.

Hazard opened the scoring in the 55th minute when he straffed along the 18-yard area before firing a low strike past Allan McGregor, much in the same fashion of his goal against Sunderland in the Capital One Cup.

Torres was able to add a late second when he struck from 18 yards to secure the points for Jose Mourinho's men.

Chelsea's fourth consecutive league victory was a no-nonsense performance from Jose Mourinho's side, with keeper Petr Cech never seriously disturbed as he notched up his 150th Premier League clean sheet and Torres made sure of the points after 87 minutes.

Torres returned to the starting side after coming off the bench in the FA Cup third round win at Derby last weekend, while David Luiz returned in midfield behind Oscar, Eden Hazard and Willian.

Jose Mourinho's men have now won four on the trot in the league and Cech is eager to keep that run going.

"The most important thing is that we keep winning games and winning trophies," he said.

"We want to win the league if we can and hopefully clean sheets will help us achieve our targets. Now we're top of the league for the first time in a long time and hopefully we can stay there.

"We hope to keep going. We are getting better and today was a very difficult game. But we were very solid and good in attack and that's why we score goals.